The US Army said Monday that had recovered critical electronics from the Chinese spy balloon shot down by a United fighter jet off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, including key sensors presumably used for intelligence gathering.
“Crews have been able to recover significant remains from the site, including all priority sensors and electronic parts identified, as well as large sections of the structure,” the US Army Northern Command said in a statement.
The Chinese balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy craft, spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before President Joe Biden ordered it torn down. The episode strained ties between Washington and Beijing, leading the US Secretary of State to postpone a trip to China.
Also led the US Army to search the skies for other objects missed by radar, leading to an unprecedented three kills in the three days between Friday and Sunday.
The US Army and the Biden Government have recognized that much is still unknown about the latest dronessuch as how they stay in the air, who built them, and whether they may have been collecting intelligence.
The Army has said targeting the latest objects has been more difficult than shooting down the Chinese spy balloon, given the objects’ smaller size and lack of traditional radar signature.
As an example of the difficulty, the latest shootdown of an unidentified object on Sunday by an F-16 fighter required two sidewinder missiles – after one of them failed to hit the target, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The White House on Monday denied accusations by Beijing that the United States has been sending balloons to fly over China for surveillance purposes, as tensions between the two superpowers have been escalating.
“Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false.”said on her Twitter account the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Adrienne Watson.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence gathering, which it has used to violate the sovereignty of the United States and more than 40 countries on five continents,” he added in that network.
Early Monday, Beijing claimed that “American balloons” had entered Chinese airspace “more than ten times without any authorization” since early last year.
The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, did not give details about the alleged US balloons, how those episodes would have been managed or if they had military or government ties.
(With information from Reuters)
Keep reading:
